“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 1964

“Then there is the other secret. There isn’t any symbolysm. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.”Ernest Hemingway, 1952, in a letter to Bernard Berenson

For a few months this summer I was a Birchbox member. It’s a pretty cool service. For $20/mo you get a little box full of samples of hair products, shampoo, soap, and other toiletries, and then they also include something interesting like a pair of sunglasses or a wallet or an iPhone cable. The last […]

The JFK Presidential Library and Museum has just released fully digitized copies of Ernest Hemingway’s mother’s scrapbooks, which chronicle the writer’s childhood and adolescent years in five volumes. The scrapbooks … juxtapose [her] observations and notes with photographs, drawings, and other ephemera … [She] recorded all of the bits of baby talk that she found […]

Talk about a literary adventure! A note from F. Scott Fitzgerald to an unknown stranger is found inscribed in a book. Almost a hundred years later, the wife of a professor — who was a friend of Fitzgerald’s daughter — notices that the last page of the book has been removed, and uses the ol’ […]

A Farewell to Arms has never been one of my favorite books, but it does contain what is possibly my favorite line ever written: “The war seemed as far away as the football games of some one else’s college.” I had no idea but am not surprised in the least to learn that Hemingway penned […]

I just received an email from the publisher of a new book about Hemingway. The book is titled The Heming Way: How to Unleash the Booze-Inhaling, Animal-Slaughtering, War-Glorifying, Hairy-Chested Retro-Sexual Legend Within, Just Like Papa!. The email asked if I’d be interested in getting a copy to review, to which I of course replied in […]

To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion is a new book compiling all the drinks — including recipes! — mentioned in the works of my favorite author. See also: How to Drink Like Hemingway, from the New York Times. I learned about it from a tweet by @carolineoncrack, an absurdly prolific blogger who […]

Today would have been the 113th birthday of Ernest Hemingway, born in Oak Park, Illinois. He started his writing life as a journalist, but when he was in Paris after World War I, working as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, he was encouraged to take a more literary turn by other American writers […]

“Hemingway personally liberated its bar from the Nazis. Proust ordered from it on his deathbed. Sophia Loren declared it “the most romantic hotel in the world.” It was, of course, the Paris Ritz — headquarters and playhouse to Coco Chanel, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, and Ingrid Bergman, among others. As the hotel closes […]

My son is almost a week into his nineteenth month, and — if I could somehow ignore the times when he has scared the ever-loving [redacted] out of me — I am still awestruck at how much I love him. We’re currently reading Across the River and into the Trees, our fourth Hemingway book, at […]